Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist Isabel Wilkerson to Lecture

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson, whose critically acclaimed 2010 book about the migration of black Americans from the south to the north and west, will deliver the 2013 Allison Davis Lecture Thursday, Nov. 7, at Northwestern University.

In 1993, Wilkerson, former Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times, became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Her lecture will take place at 4:30 p.m. in Harris Hall Auditorium, 1881 Sheridan Road, on the Evanston campus. It is free and open to the public.

Wilkerson’s book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” almost instantly hit number five on The New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction. Named one of the best books of 2010 by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post and the Economics, Wilkerson, in 2011, won the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Sidney Hillman Book Prize and the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction.

She earned the Pulitzer Prize for her feature coverage of the 1994 Midwest floods and a profile of a 10-year-old boy growing up in Chicago. She also has won a George S. Polk Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and, in 1994, was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists.

Delivered annually by the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and the department of African American studies at Northwestern, the Allison Davis Lectures were established to honor educator, anthropologist, writer and scholar Davis. In the 1940s, Davis became the first African American to receive tenure at a non-historically black institution.

Previous Davis lecturers have included William Julius Wilson, Johnnetta Cole, Mary Frances Berry, Randall Kennedy, Barbara D. Savage and Vijay Prashad.

For further information, visit the website of the African American studies department, email s-denose@northwestern.edu or call (847) 467-3466.